B.P. (Before Peterbilt) Trucking

Transitions in the Rocky Mountain west

Feature Article from Hemmings Classic Car

It was a gradual thing. Paved highways extended away from cities, then trucks and powertrains were created to ply them. Trucks got bigger, though in some cases, not necessarily faster.

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Trucking lifer, author and historian Ken Goudy of Oregon City, Oregon, maneuvered us through a series of interlaced changes in manufacturers, engines and business as trucking evolved. We'll start with the tractor. This photo dates from around 1938, taken somewhere distant from Salt Lake City, and the rig is being pulled by one of the first true over-the-road diesels, a three-axle Fageol, built in Oakland, California.
The Fageol brothers, Frank and William, started out building cars in their native Des Moines, Iowa. The cars looked like early Franklins and were incredibly luxurious, with optional ivory door handles and power from a six-cylinder aero engine built by Elbert J. Hall, whose California firm became Hall-Scott. Only three Fageol cars were built, however, before the whole operation was distracted by World War I production. That's when the brothers switched to trucks and moved their business to Oakland.
Fageol became a successful producer of well-regarded heavy trucks and, eventually, buses made under the Twin Coach name (in Kent, Ohio, for a while under the ownership of American Car & Foundry of Detroit). Meanwhile, the Fageol truck was evolving and gaining capacity, with Fageol-built main transmissions, Brown-Lipe auxiliaries, Timken axles, Ross steering and the early exclusive use of pneumatic tires. Waukesha gasoline engines gave way to Hall-Scott power and then to early Waukesha and Cummins diesels, producing 150hp to 175hp. Technologically, Fageols were impressive, but aesthetically, they were stuck in the 1920s. Ken's got a photo of one dragging a trailer across rural Utah on a highway that's the merest crust of blacktop on the desert floor. The diesel smoke's barely blowing backward.
Then came 1937. Fageol unveiled a dramatically restyled highway tractor with an aerodynamic cab, led by a V-shaped streamlined windshield. The upright, square radiator shell was jettisoned. In its place went a rounded waterfall of aluminum strips, with matching vents on either side of the hood. The fenders became shapelier. The headlamps were moved from their earlier location atop the fenders in Pierce-Arrow fashion to spots more tightly flanking the grille, positioned down low, closer to the bumper.
Look closely. Taken together, what do you see here? The answer, simply, is the basis of an early Peterbilt. Solid design wasn't quite enough during the Depression, and from the early 1930s on, Fageol had tried to cut a merger deal with Moreland, which built both trucks and specialty trailers in Burbank. It never came to pass. In 1938, not long after the rig you see was built, Fageol's truck-building assets became the property of Sterling, from Milwaukee. One year later, production halted completely and Sterling went looking for a buyer. It found one in the person of Theodore Alfred Peterman, a logging boss and sometime truck modifier from Oregon. Peterman bought the remains of Fageol for $50,000 flat and renamed the trucks, with nearly no changes, as Peterbilts. The first ones reached the market in 1939.
We're not done with this story yet. This Fageol diesel is pulling for Conyes Freight Lines, a firm that was based in Salt Lake City during the 1930s, and did most of its hauling in the Rocky Mountain states. That was an intimidating prospect in the early diesel years. Ken got this photo from a collector some 20 years ago. The driver, or drivers, has likely stopped at this Flying A station to refuel. Look at the fuel pump. It's one of the old hand-cranked types that lifted petroleum into the glass tube, so the motorist could measure how much fuel he was gravity-flowing into his tank. Rural stations used them for both gasoline and diesel fuel.
Despite the ambitious markings on the trailer stripe, Conyes never hauled as far as Chicago, certainly not to New York, and usually not even as far as Denver. "They were mainly a regional carrier," Ken told us. Conyes was originally called Lilenquist Truck Lines, mainly hauling butter; later, the company became known as Utah-California Truck Lines, and ultimately, through mergers, morphed into the famed Pacific Mountain Express. As Conyes, the line made its own trailers, including this insulated, ventilated unit. As Ken explained, "They would put big cans of ice into the trailer before refrigeration came along."
There's a single, tall, skinny exhaust stack, without a muffler. The headlamps are huge. Underneath the bumper is a single driving lamp that was angled to the right and downward; the drivers called them ditch lights. Likely, the diesel here is a Cummins, hooked to the Fageol transmission, linked in turn to the Brown-Lipe auxiliary. "They'd have a four-speed main with a three-speed Brownie, as we referred to them. We called them Mixmasters. With those 12 gears, you could do all kinds of things. My dad, who drove a Fageol for Lee and Estes, was a master with them, putting his left arm through the steering wheel to grab one stick while using his right hand to shift the other one.
"You needed lots of patience, because they weren't fast. If you got up to 40 MPH even on level ground, you were moving good," Ken said. "Air brakes were just coming along. There's no sleeper, so the longest these drivers would run was probably 150 miles to a division point, where another driver would take over. But in those days, over the mountains, that was eight to 10 hours. You'd be down to 5 MPH. They could be a bearcat going slow, but they were good going fast, and I learned to drive on a Fageol."

This article originally appeared in the August, 2012 issue of Hemmings Classic Car.